HMS Porpoise (N14): From Laying Mines to Ferrying Commandos in the Pacific

The Build: Barrow

HMS Porpoise was built by Vickers-Armstrongs at Barrow, launched on 30 August 1932 and commissioned on 11 March 1933, a Grampus-class submarine purpose-built for minelaying, capable of carrying fifty mines in place of a conventional torpedo loadout, a specialised and properly demanding role that required precise, dangerous work close to enemy waters.

A War Fought Across Three Oceans

Porpoise operated in the North Sea in 1940, before serving in the Mediterranean from late 1941 through 1942, where she sank a number of merchant and military vessels in the kind of hard, sustained patrol work that defined the submarine war in that theatre. By 1944 she had moved on again, this time to operate against Japanese forces in the Pacific, and on 11 September 1944 she took part in Operation Rimau, ferrying 24 Australian commandos as part of one of the most daring and ultimately tragic special operations of the entire Pacific war.

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Lost With All Hands Off Penang

HMS Porpoise was sunk on 19 January 1945 by Japanese aircraft near Penang, with the loss of her entire crew of 59 men, the last Royal Navy submarine ever lost to enemy action. Japanese records describe a submarine spotted and bombed in the vicinity, struck by a single hit that sent her to the bottom. It was a devastating loss of experienced submariners who had already fought across three different theatres of war, and deserves to be remembered with the full seriousness and respect it warrants.

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